


I’ll Be Doing Just Fine

by Atelicu



Category: Bob's Burgers (Cartoon)
Genre: AU, Abortion, Accidental Death, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Attempted Murder, Autoerotic Asphyxiation, Bloody Imagery, Character Death, Dark, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Faked Miscarriage, Gold Digging, I Will Not Be Sympathetic, If You Come Whining to Me After Ignoring These Tags, Implied/Referenced Sibling Incest, M/M, Manipulation, Masochism, Minor Character Death, Murder, None of the Sex Is Eroticized, Pay attention to the tags, Pornography, Poverty, Profanity, Secondary Pairings Are Only Mentioned Briefly, Self-Destruction, Serial Killer, Suicide, Third Person Present Tense Narration, Underage Sex, Underage Sex with a Peer, Underage Sex with an Adult, Unrequited Love, What-If, femme dom, mention of BDSM, no seriously, possible future, violent imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 18:28:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23771074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Atelicu/pseuds/Atelicu
Summary: What would happen if Bob Belcher died by accident in a trap Louise set up as part of one of the kids’ prank wars?  Maybe something a little like this.  Very dark - please read and heed the tags!
Relationships: Andy Pesto/Ollie Pesto, Felix Fischoeder/Fanny (Bob's Burgers), Gene Belcher/Courtney Wheeler, Gene Belcher/Jimmy Pesto Jr., Jimmy Pesto Jr./Zeke (Bob's Burgers), Linda Belcher/Hugo Habercore, Linda Belcher/Teddy (Bob's Burgers), Louise Belcher/Boo Boo (Bob's Burgers), Louise Belcher/Calvin Fischoeder, Louise Belcher/Griffin (Bob's Burgers), Louise Belcher/Logan Bush, Louise Belcher/Phillip Frond - Relationship, Louise Belcher/Rudolph "Regular Sized Rudy" Steiblitz, Louise Belcher/Teddy (Bob's Burgers), Tina Belcher/Jimmy Pesto Jr., Tina Belcher/Zeke (Bob's Burgers)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 24





	I’ll Be Doing Just Fine

Louise kills her father when she’s nine and a half. 

She never meant to—she was just trying to win the ever-escalating prank war with Tina and Gene. Unfortunately for everyone, Bob ran afoul of her efforts less than half an hour after Louise pulled out some loose nails anchoring a tread on the stair. He came barreling down after some hamburger meat and the board flew out of place. He cartwheeled down the stairs onto the basement floor and broke his neck. He died fast; he never uttered a peep.

Louise was the one who found him, but before she screamed for help, in a fit of guilty terror she fumbled the board and the nails back into place just like they were before she set the prank. She was never implicated in his death, and the guilt and loss ate at her inside like a cancer.

People Louise cares about don’t fare very well over the coming years. 

She used to slap people she loved; now she begins to think about the people she loves having... accidents.

Linda is next.

Louise turns on her in a fit of pique—and the death, well, maybe it’s sorta accidental, only it’s really sorta not. They’re struggling to keep the restaurant open, losing money every day because Linda’s a shitty money manager and an even worse fry cook. Teddy would marry her in a heartbeat, but she doesn’t want him and she won’t date Hugo, either. She won’t date anybody.

The restaurant struggles even more than it used to, floundering without Bob’s genius and with the kids doing most of the work. Louise is only ten and Tina isn’t much better than her; Gene is entirely useless. Plus the kids all have school most of the day. Linda starts drinking way too much and she’s completely unable to keep up with disciplining or taking care of her brood without Bob. The family is forced to go on welfare and is dependent on charity and food stamps. Andy and Ollie (and sometimes Jimmy Junior) sneak out unused leftovers and past-its-expiration-date food for them to eat from Jimmy Pesto’s. 

Louise absolutely hates living a life of poverty. 

After Linda drinks up the rent money for the third time, she and Louise argue bitterly. They fight in the restaurant while they should be closing. Linda is still drinking when Louise goes storming out, flinging her cleaning rag at the sink. Only it falls on the grill, but she’s too mad to care. Tina’s out fooling around with the latest annoying jackass in a long line of annoying jackasses, Gene’s off with stupid Courtney Wheeler, and Louise takes a long walk to cool down. In the back of her head, she wonders what will happen, but doesn’t really think anything will.

When she comes back, the fire department is there, and an ambulance, and the building is a smoking ruin. Her mother’s body has a sheet pulled up over its face. There’ll be no more boozy afternoons leading to passed-out nights. There’ll be no more obnoxious singing.

All the kids have left is a bank account with about twenty-three dollars in it, which isn’t a drop in the bucket of what they need, and a bunch of random junk they’d stored in the prepaid locker rental her dad inherited when his uncle died. The locker gets seized as part of an effort to pay off the family debts, but the county officials think the stuff inside is more or less worthless, so the kids get to keep some of it.

Since her blood alcohol content tests at near-coma level in the autopsy, the fire department’s official investigation blames Linda for the carelessly-tossed rag and Louise gets off Scot-free again.

Hugo actually sobs at Linda’s funeral. “You should have married me!” He flings himself over the closed face of Linda's coffin. “Why wouldn’t you marry me?” Ron has to drag him away, kicking and yelling. Teddy is white-faced and silent, wringing his inevitable knitted cap between his hands. His head is bald and Louise notices that yes, the back of it does look like a butt. The front isn't any better; his eyes are puffy and rimmed with red.

Louise keeps her mouth shut. There go two men who don’t know when they’re better off.

Gayle is named the first legal guardian. 

Louise just can’t stand living with dumbass Gayle and all those fucking evil cats. In less than six months, she’s desperate enough to start engineering a series of unsuccessful “accidents” that Gayle survives mostly out of sheer clumsy luck. Gayle’s such a space cadet she never realizes what’s going on, and she definitely never sees the final trip-trap Louise sets on the staircase—one of her own bras clotheslines her and she goes down backward. The coroner eventually says she fractured her skull and hemorrhaged into her brain. Louise puts the bra back in Gayle’s lingerie drawer before anyone discovers the body, and Tina finds Gayle while Louise is fast asleep on the foldaway couch the three kids all share in Gayle’s living room. 

Nobody guesses Louise killed Gayle, but everyone agrees: what a horrible fate seems to be following those poor Belcher children! 

“Back again,” Louise says to Mort, who looks wildly uncomfortable with the whole ridiculous situation. “Can we get a discount for volume?”

Amidst outpourings of pity and concern, after a painful process that determines Gloria and Al obviously can’t take them to live at a swinger’s commune and they certainly can’t go to Big Bob, who’s bedridden now after his second heart attack, Teddy steps in and takes custody of the kids. He bravely says Bob would have wanted him to.

They stand together on Teddy’s filthy carpet, feeling out of place in his cluttered living room, looking at each other blankly, with Tina clutching Mr. Business’s carrier in one hand and a backpack full of Gayle’s shabby hand-me-downs in the other. Louise has her backpack with Kuchi Kopi in it and her pink rabbit ears. Gene has his keyboard and a plastic package half-full of the new, inferior Chunky Blast-Offs. They also have the clothes on their backs, and that’s all.

As a parent, Teddy’s a pushover. Louise has had him hoodwinked since she was three. Maybe longer. As Louise’s guardian, Teddy lasts longer than Louise might have predicted. She doesn’t care about him that much and she can get him to do whatever she wants, so why should she want to get rid of him? He’s not as intolerable as Gayle and he does much better about keeping them fed and clothed than Linda did—even though God knows he’s a shitty parent. The proof of that is when Tina has to have an abortion a couple months after she and Jimmy Junior discover there’s more to sex than butt-touching fantasies. When he finds out, Teddy just flails. 

“What would your father say?” He wrings his hands and asks it over and over.

“Something dumb with a lame pun. A bun out of the oven, maybe?” Louise answers, and that just about sums it up.

Louise and Tina don’t talk about the abortion. Louise knows Tammy drove Tina to Bog Harbor to get it; everybody knows, because Tammy immediately spread the tale all over Wagstaff. Mr. Frond has given up on Tina; she wouldn’t even try to talk to his Embarrassed Harris amigurumi therapy doll when he attempted to counsel her about her unwanted pregnancy, and he’s got no clue how to handle all the trauma she’s been through. He gives her a whole box of raisins-- that’s the best he can do.

Tina doesn’t talk much to Louise and Gene these days. She’s still boy-crazy and she still writes zombie stories, though. She’s publishing darkfic zombie erotica on the web under the pen-name “Dina” and is building quite a nihilistic little following of zombie-loving perverts over on AO3. 

Louise figures maybe on some level Tina doesn’t think Bob and Linda and Gayle are actually dead-- in her head, maybe they’re just waiting to rise from the grave and go around touching people’s butts in between devouring the brains of the living.

But Tina is growing up; even Gene’s getting older. Louise herself has just barely turned 13. She still loves Boo Boo, but her daydreams about him... let’s just say they’re not very nice. She gets off on them, though. Slapping is the least of what she’d like to do to him. She’s got dominatrix paraphernalia catalogs (Mrs. Samuels from Linda’s failed bed and breakfast left one of hers behind in her rush to leave, and it formed the seed of Louise’s collection) and _Soldier of Fortune_ magazines hidden under her bed, and her getaway kit has all real stuff in it now. Some of it would completely terrify anybody who saw it, but Teddy gets Louise whatever she asks for, if she asks the right way. And she always does.

Kuchi Kopi was in Louise’s backpack when the restaurant burned-- she carried the new one everywhere with her for a few years after her family destroyed the first one-- and he still sits on Louise’s bedside table even though his light has burned out. He’s pretty dirty now, but she doesn’t put him away. He’s her last link with her father. She dreams about them all sometimes. Good Kuchi Kopi and Bad Kuchi Kopi and Bob Belcher. Kuchi Kopi still has her dad’s voice, but the dreams about Good Kuchi Kopi get less and less frequent. 

Gene turns 15, confused as hell about his sexuality and just as head-over-heels for Jimmy Junior as Tina ever was. Louise doesn’t say anything, but she knows Gene was the second Belcher to get into Jay Ju’s pants before getting his ass dumped. Luckily for him, unlike Tina, Gene couldn’t get pregnant. Louise doesn’t understand the attraction, but she feels sorry for Gene anyway. She loves her large brother.

Instead of going after Teddy right away, Louise makes Gene her next victim-- out of necessity. 

Gene finds out about Bob and Linda and Gayle somehow. Maybe he guesses; maybe he knew all along. Louise doesn't know, and she doesn't wait to find out. He confronts Louise one day with his suspicions. Next thing anybody knows, Gene’s found hanging in his closet, suffocated to death. It was apparently an auto-erotic asphyxiation mishap; anyone can see he accidentally kicked away the crate that would’ve supported him. 

Sergeant Bosco buys the story, like he did all the others. 

After Mort buries Gene next to Linda and Bob, Mr. Frond decides to try extra hard to fix Louise, and she’s old enough now to see opportunity knocking. She stops mocking him and starts learning to play him instead. Pretty soon he’s as helpless as Teddy. All she has to do is bat her lashes at him and say something flattering, and he’s eating out of the palm of her hand. He thinks she’s a great triumph; she’s doing better in school and she’s even stopped wearing those ridiculous rabbit ears. He exults that maybe he’ll win an award for turning her life around.

Louise is very pretty without the ears on. When she realizes this, she takes a new interest in clothes and makeup and styling her hair because she has come to understand she can use them as tools to manipulate others. She doesn’t go all clown/whore like Tammy Larsen—she goes sophisticated and slinky and hard to get. She gets a reputation for being sort of a female Lenny DeStefano. She flirts with everyone, but she won’t date anybody more than once, she teases but she doesn’t put out, and after she blossoms and sprouts a sweet ass and big boobs, she drives the boys wild. 

“Mr. Frond,” she says one day, less than a month before she transfers to high school. “Phillip. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I wish I could do something for you in return.” She lays one hand atop his, her expression demure, and smiles shyly up at him through her lashes. He doesn't answer, just stares at their hands without withdrawing, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat like a knot in a jerked rope.

After that he stops calling Louise to his office for counseling. Maybe his mother warned him about girls like her. Or maybe it was Miss LaBonz or Miss Schnurr who told him he was gonna get in trouble for hauling a pretty young student off to be alone with him in his office every damn day. Whatever. Louise is just relieved that she doesn’t have to endure his vapid attempts at counseling anymore; Frond’s taught her all she can learn from him about manipulating men.

Other than the change in faculty and staff, high school is a lot like junior high. In between dates Louise goes to a couple of Boys 4 Now concerts with Tina on Teddy’s dime and looks up onto the stage at Boo Boo and thinks she could hit that. Literally. With a whole assortment of floggers. She smiles and bides her time.

She has her first time in a field on the edge of town with Regular Sized Rudy, just out of curiosity, because he’s easy and familiar and unthreatening, and she wants to see what all the fuss is about. She makes him use a condom because she’s smarter than Tina. He has an asthma attack halfway through the foreplay, but he doesn’t want to stop, so they keep on after he recovers. Turns out his asthma medicine tastes pretty nasty second-hand, but she lets him kiss her anyway.

Louise doesn’t much like the sex. It hurts and it’s messy and the actual fucking is over very, very quickly. But she sees how it totally messes Rudy up and makes him a vulnerable emotional basket case, and she thinks, “I can work with this.” When he’s finished, Regular Sized Rudy cries and she holds him, patting his back absently and looking up at the branches of the trees overhead, bored, wondering how it happened for Tina’s first time way back when.

A few months later, Regular Sized Rudy’s body is found on the beach under the wharf. The last people who saw him say he was riding his bike along the pier, using the uneven boards as jumping ramps. He must have fallen into the sea, then drowned before he could swim back to shore. Probably falling in the cold water triggered an asthma attack. He might have been caught in a rip current, too. Louise goes to the funeral and makes sure people see that her mascara is smeared, but she’s dry-eyed. She’s just got an eye-dropper and a bottle of saline solution hidden in her pocket.

Louise starts sharpening her claws on Teddy next.

She tests and hones a whole assortment of feminine wiles on Teddy over the next year or so— giving him “accidental” peeks of skin when she’s been taking a shower, going past his room clad in delicately calculated dishabille at night, touching him here and there during vulnerable moments and in ways that ought to be innocent but aren’t, exposing glimpses of breast and thigh as she bends over everyday tasks, or just modulating the tone of her voice and the way she moves when she talks to him. 

It’s easy to figure out what works and what doesn’t. 

Before he knows it, Teddy’s afraid to set foot in his own home because he’s having Improper Thoughts about his youngest ward. She’s so little, so innocent—he must be horrible. Evil. He’s betrayed Bob and Linda. He should be ashamed of himself. She hears him moaning about it, talking in his sleep. He goes into excruciating detail, and she uses every bit of it against him.

Eventually Louise sees to it that Teddy gets passing-out drunk one night—and arranges for him to come to the next morning with her lying helpless, her slight body half-crushed under him, her flimsy nightgown ripped off and crumpled on the floor, some convenient menstrual blood smeared on the bed and on his limp dick, brightly incriminating between her thighs. He jumps straight to the incorrect conclusion she intended.

Now Louise doesn’t even have to manipulate Teddy at all to get what she wants. Teddy is so horrified by what he thinks happened, he’d do anything for her by way of apology. Louise smiles, faint and saintlike, martyred. “You’ve been so good to us, Teddy. You couldn’t help it; you were drinking. You took us in and raised us like we were your own. I can forgive this. I owed it to you. Really. It’s okay. It’ll be our little secret. Can you afford to get me, you know, tested? I hate to ask, but….” 

Teddy shuffles around in despair, hating himself. He gains a lot more weight and the rest of his hair falls out so that he doesn’t have to shave the sides of his head anymore, and his eyebrows and beard and chest hair go gray. He works all the time now—when he can’t find paid jobs, he donates his time to charity, trying to make amends for what he’s done. Louise lets him wallow. 

“I should’ve let you kids go to the Wharfanage,” Teddy laments sometimes. “Somebody good might have adopted you.” 

She shrugs, trying not to let him see her smirk.

Tina gets knocked up again, and this time she decides to keep the baby. Louise is to be maid of honor at the shotgun wedding, and her duty will be to watch from beside the altar as Tina and her babydaddy Zeke “get hitched.” Tina plans to live with Zeke in a shitty trailer outside of town, not too far from where there used to be a two-butted goat, where the farmer without doubt slaughtered Drew P. Neck for the table before ever fading out of sight in the Belchers’ rear-view mirror on that Thanksgiving day way back when Louise's father was still alive. 

Louise wonders if Zeke is bisexual or completely gay but in denial. Whichever. Both he and Tina are obviously still carrying a torch for Jimmy Junior, who’s fucked off to attend Rutgers with Darryl and Lenny. But Zeke is Tina’s problem, not Louise’s.

Tina’s cheap, off-the-rack beige dress fades right into the wallpaper of the Wonder Wharf Community Recreation Center on her wedding day. Edith made her a bridal bouquet—it’s stuffed with yellow silk roses (“Yellow for infidelity,” Edith announces loudly to everyone who’ll listen), and there’s a telltale bulge in Tina’s belly already. All you’ll be able to see in the photos are Tina's dark hair and her glasses (and Edith in the background stealing all she can carry of the meager refreshments). Zeke is grinning like a madman, but Tina looks shell-shocked. Louise thinks maybe she should arrange an accident for Tina—it’d be a mercy killing, really—but she doesn’t have much opportunity to spend time near her sister anymore, and she might get caught this time.

“Mom would’ve been so proud,” Louise wisecracks.

“Jimmy Pesto Senior bought the burned building where we had the restaurant,” Tina retaliates. “He wants to get it refurbished and turn it into a gift shop.”

Her dad always hoped Louise would take over the restaurant when he was gone. She shrugs and pretends she doesn’t care.

When Louise turns sixteen, she gets a part-time job at Wonder Wharf. At first she’s working the guess-your-age-and-weight booth for half of minimum wage plus tips (as if anybody ever tips you when you guess their age and weight correctly). She recites her barker routine while she watches Mr. Fischoeder doing his rounds, and she contrives reasons to hitch up her skirt whenever he comes near to give him a good look at her shapely legs.

He doesn’t miss it. He gives her a shark’s smile, and she gives him one right back.

Pretty soon Louise is taking tickets, and then she’s working in the accounting office, and then she’s an executive secretary and she’s got a desk in the anteroom to Mr. Fischoeder’s office so he can look at her legs whenever he wants. She spends her workdays taking a few phone messages, surfing the web, and filing her nails. She likes keeping them honed sharp.

Then Mr. Fischoeder turns into Calvin, and very soon after that, she’s got a workstation in his bed. He’s a total sleaze; he doesn’t give a good goddamn that she isn’t legal yet in the USA. “We’ll just move to the United Kingdom,” he chirps. "Sixteen's legal there!" And they go at it.

Louise soon realizes she doesn’t need Teddy anymore. 

She starts talking about their fictional non-con liaison whenever she’s home. A lot. She describes what she “remembers.” She says going through it again and again is all part of her rape recovery therapy. Then she goes off to let nature take its course.

His neighbors find Teddy when the apartment starts to smell funny. He’s on his knees with his head stuck in his gas oven. His suicide note says he’s sorry; it says he knows he doesn’t deserve to live and this is the only way he can think of to make amends-- but fortunately for Louise, it doesn’t get any more specific than that. Louise pulls the eyedropper trick again at his funeral. By the look of things, Tina already has another bun in the oven, and she has a snotty squalling brat balanced on each hip already. 

Louise vows that’s never gonna be her.

She leaves her Kuchi Kopi doll and all her other dismal stuff right where it is in Teddy’s lonely, reeking apartment. Maybe it gets auctioned off or thrown away or something. Whatever. She moves in with Calvin Fischoeder, and he buys her all the nice things she tells him she needs.

Louise struggles for a while, working hard on Calvin. He’s a canny bastard, cagey and tough to pin down; of all her rivals, he was the only one who could ever best her. But then, you could fairly say the same thing of her in relation to him. She finally sinks her claws in deep enough that she gets the horrible old fool to agree he’ll marry her. She has to claim she’s pregnant to get him to seal the deal, and Zeke brings her one of Tina’s positive pregnancy test sticks to use to convince him. 

Calvin has a weakness for his family line, and he admits that when he’s feeling sentimental, he’s reluctant to let a child of his grow up without his name. Louise grits her teeth behind a big, fake smile and learns how to keep him feeling sentimental most of the time.

Louise fakes a miscarriage a month after the wedding. Zeke helps her. She thinks Tina doesn’t know. She thinks Calvin does. She starts working on him anyway, trying anything she can think of to get him to change his will in her favor.

Felix is pretty sure what she’s up to, of course. Felix hates her like burning. But Calvin doesn’t take Felix seriously no matter how hard he foams at the mouth. 

In the end, she thinks her husband makes the change to his will just to piss Felix off. He probably means to change it right back once he’s taught his brother a lesson, but not very long at all after Louise nags him into giving her what she wants in the will, Calvin dies in a sea-planing accident with his buddy Up-Skirt Kurt, who apparently forgot to gas up his beloved Shoshana before they went for their final weekly joyride. 

This time the cops get help from somebody smarter than Bosco to investigate the incident. The detectives consider Louise seriously as a murder suspect, but she has an iron-clad alibi: she was in Bali getting a series of spa treatments to cheer her up after supposedly losing her baby.

Zeke doesn’t ever get fingered as a possible suspect, because luckily Gus was asleep on the job that afternoon and never saw him wandering around with a gas can in his hand. Louise knows Zeke buried the siphon in a vacant lot near Mort’s mother’s house. 

Zeke starts tooling around town in a new car a month or two after the detectives give up. It’s a real hotrod: a vintage Camaro with flames painted on the sides and glass-pack mufflers and boom car bass speakers in the trunk. He likes to burn the tread off the tires, just revving it up and letting them smoke, then pop it into gear and leap forward like a jackrabbit. Mysteriously, even though his wife and kids are eating government cheese and have to buy their clothes from Goodwill, Zeke always seems able to get new tires, and he always has plenty of gasoline to go cruising.

Louise cuts Felix off from the gravy train before Calvin’s body is cold, and just to add insult to injury, she packs him off to live in a slum tenement in a gangster neighborhood in Detroit, the only one of Calvin’s investment properties she’ll agree to sign over to him. She tells him he can get a job remodeling abandoned houses and laughs in his face when he promises that one day he’ll be back to get his revenge. 

As soon as Felix leaves for Detroit, Louise hunts up his old girlfriend Fanny—sure enough, she’s a single mom with no prospects—and sends her after him. But first, Louise fills Fanny’s ear with lying hints that Felix could still wind up with a bundle of the Fischoeder family money someday and advises Fanny to claim the child is his. Maybe it is. Louise doesn't care. 

She’s sitting around idly watching a video of Andy and Ollie—they’re starring in a popular hardcore gay twin porn series; Louise thinks Jimmy Junior must have met a dodgy producer at college and introduced them to him—when Felix phones, frothing with rage, to accuse her of putting Fanny on his tail. “Who’s that knocking at your door? Hey, it’s Missus Dance Floor,” she sings down the phone to him while he curses at her. It’s very Linda, but it feels too good not to.

Calvin’s money isn’t enough for Louise. He’s been living near the edge of his means for a long time, recent quid pro quo debts Louise incurred in her pursuit of his property and fortune have been heavy, and Wonder Wharf is a money-sucking hellhole. The old man must have loved it, or he’d have run screaming to a real estate agency to unload it decades ago. 

None of his rental properties are worth enough to support Louise in the style to which she'd like to become accustomed. In fact, if Calvin didn’t have hidden investments sunk into a couple of dozen illegal gambling operations, Louise would be forced to sell the mansion. As it is, she doesn’t like those kinds of assets; they’re not reliable enough for her.

Louise spends a completely unwise amount on a new designer wardrobe, makeover, mani, pedi, hairstyle (the works), and bribes herself into an invitation to a prestigious Grammy after-party. Boo Boo is there; he just won a Grammy for “best male solo artist” or something like that. She doesn’t care what the award is for. She hasn’t listened to music much since she was fifteen. Now she’s twenty and the world is her oyster—if she plays her cards right.

Louise gives Boo Boo her best soft smile from across the room and toasts him silently with her untasted glass of cabernet sauvignon. 

He works his way through the crowd eventually. “Aren’t you the little girl who slapped me way back when?” He’s falling for it: hook, line, and sinker.

Louise looks at him through her lashes and makes him a seductive moue, parting her lips. “Maybe,” she says. “If you didn’t mind.”

It turns out Boo Boo is a screaming bottom-boy, and he’s even adaptable when it comes to pain. 

Better yet, Boo Boo’s investment portfolio is a hell of a lot better than Calvin’s, and it’s on the up-and-up, too. As a child star, he lucked into that rarest of creatures: a responsible, honest business manager. 

Perfect. 

A few months later Louise says “I will” while Boo Boo (Arthur. He tells her his real name is Arthur, and she’s the only one who gets to use it) rests on one knee in front of her, holding up a huge diamond in a little ring-box, enacting a scene out of his own pathetic, idealistic song-lyrics. She puts it on her finger, and he never notices she’s eyeing up his old band-mate, Griffin, who’s bored with the girl that’s squirming on his lap as he’s sitting on the sofa across the room.

With a Grammy on his mantel and Louise behind him to help polish up his new lyrics and get him to cultivate a misunderstood bad-boy image, Arthur’s career skyrockets. They don’t get along very well after a couple of years, though. Predictably enough, while Louise is out of the country doing some very visible charity work, Arthur eventually overdoses on a combination of prescription sleeping pills and alcohol—how very Michael Jackson of him, really!—conveniently leaving Louise as his sole inheritor. She’s set for life, and Griffin is still hanging around somewhere. Maybe she’ll give him a tumble; maybe not. Maybe she’ll get in her husband’s private jet and make a vow never to be in the same country for two sunsets in a row. 

Of course, Zeke tackled his illicit foray into Arthur’s medicine cabinet (and the security surveillance room) with his typical _joie de vivre._ He’s absolutely gonna love his brand new Orange County Choppers custom Harley. Louise even ordered a horn that’ll hoot “I’M GONNA GITCHA!” when he squeezes the bulb. Louise likes working with Zeke; as long as she buys him a new set of tires or a preloaded gas card every so often, he’s too ADD to follow through with any plans to blackmail her for lots of hush money.

Louise prepares for her husband’s funeral and thinks about looking up Helen, just for old times’ sake. Louise has discovered that for a serial killer, true peers are in short supply. Maybe they could compare husband-murdering notes over imported German beer. But Helen killing Larry, well, that just doesn’t measure up anymore. Louise’s own body count is up to nine and her fortune makes the Goodwin clock legacy look like chump change. Frankly, Helen is small potatoes. 

Louise carefully puts on the funeral ensemble she’s had planned for months: black Louboutins with blood-red soles and translucent matte black hose under a sleek but modest black raw silk Chanel, accented with her diamond and platinum wedding ring and a single strand of wildly expensive real white pearls-- not quite a gift from Calvin; she found them hidden in his things after he died. They probably belonged to his mother. 

She selects a tasteful velvet-trimmed black cartwheel hat, the brim tilted forward to shade her eyes, with a speckled net veil that tapers down to her chin and is opaque enough to partly obscure her features from the intrusive lenses of the ever-present paparazzi. Before putting on her hat, she gets an eye-dropper and applies water liberally to her mascara, meticulously creating the “drowned raccoon” look that’s so very obligatory for a grieving young widow. 

“Little Queen Trashmouth,” Louise says to the mirror. She activates the intercom with one immaculately-lacquered long crimson fingernail. “Have Nat bring my limousine around.”

“Yes, ma’am.” 

While she rides to her husband’s funeral service, Louise consults her accountants via telephone and makes her final plans to liquidate Calvin’s dodgy assets and merge the resulting cash with her current fortune just as soon as Arthur’s financial affairs are found to be in order. “We’ll sell the mansion and the amusement park, too,” she says. “And all his rentals. At a loss, if we have to. If you can get a buyer who’s interested in making the whole waterfront into a nuclear power plant, or hell, maybe even a landfill? I might be willing to pay them to take it.”

Tina turns up at Arthur’s funeral. Louise winces at her sister's dirty, fraying mom-jeans and her old “Boo Crew” T-shirt, which is faded and holes have worn in it where Tina's upper arms rub against her breasts, but at least it started its long, eventful life as a shade of black. Unfortunately, her bra presumably began its life as a shade of white, but as everyone can plainly see, it’s gray now. Jeez. Couldn’t she have made at least a _little_ effort?

“You didn’t invite me to the wedding,” Tina says, reproachful, after the service is over and people are starting to drift away. 

Louise is taken off-guard; she’s been eyeing a tall blond young man who was standing on the other side of the grave site during the service. Something about him seems awfully damned familiar, but she just can’t put her finger on it….

“Tina, Tina. We had to invite two thousand people on Boo Boo’s side alone, and the sanctuary at the cathedral only held 1800. Can you imagine the catering bill?” Remembering the disaster of a wedding her family catered together not long before Bob died, Louise laughs a lot longer and louder than she should. The two kids Tina brought along-- her two eldest-- squint up at Louise through thick-lensed dork glasses, a mirror image of Tina herself, but the boy has Zeke’s pugnacious jaw instead of the weak Belcher family chin. 

Now that she’s stepped away from the graveside carpet, Louise’s spike heels are trying to sink into the turf. The razor-keen need to escape is swelling in her, so strong she thinks that very soon, she may be unable to restrain a scream.

Tina produces an uncomfortable smile and winds up looking like a baby with a bad case of gas. Louise turns her heavy diamond wedding ring around and around and around on her finger, a nervous habit. She always wears the ice; she likes it. It’s the only thing she likes about her erstwhile marriage.

Louise notices abruptly that Tina’s got a ring of her own—a dark puffy one around her eye, but she doesn’t ask her sister if she walked into a door, or if it was a fist. She knows damn well it was the latter; Zeke wears a pinky ring Louise got for him, and there’s a darker purple spot right where it struck home. Men are like that; even Arthur tried to hit Louise a few times. Serves him right that he’s six feet under. Maybe Tina should take a lesson out of Louise’s book, but she definitely won’t. 

Louise doesn’t say anything. She may need Zeke again someday. 

“Say hello to your Aunt Louise, Al,” Tina says, nudging her son forward, and the boy mutters ‘hi’ to Louise sulkily, giving her a belligerent look and waving an awkward hand in her direction. The girl starts making Tina’s old trademark uneasy moaning noise. She’s afraid of her aunt. She should be. 

Louise waves back unenthusiastically, edging backwards—easing one foot behind the other again and again, slow and steady. She can spot a blatant gold-digging attempt a mile away-- it takes one to know one.

“Maybe you’d like to babysit sometime and get to know the kids while I’m in class at Wonder Wharf Community College. I’m learning shorthand and stenography.” Tina looks hopeful as she follows Louise toward the parking lot, clutching a grubby small hand in each of her own.

Shorthand and stenography. In the digital age. Louise rolls her eyes. “Yeah, have your people call my people,” she says. She doesn’t give Tina a number. 

“I’ve been keeping this for you. It was with my Chariot doll in the storage locker,” Tina says in a last-ditch effort to keep Louise there, reaching into her shoulder bag and holding out a battered Easy Breezy cardboard shoe box. It’s the very same box that once held Tina’s imaginary ghost boyfriend; Louise can just make “JEFF” out, big block letters scrawled on the lid in faded marker.

Inside lie some dead bugs and the warped remains of Louise’s original Kuchi Kopi doll. “I had to sell Chariot to get enough money for Gloria’s school clothes.” Tina’s gaze holds Louise’s now, eyes blinking slowly, magnified by her thick, smudged glasses. “Bronconius still wanted her, and I got a lot better deal this time.”

Gloria and Al? Great; Tina named the kids after their great-grandparents. The original Gloria is probably still alive down in Boca, sitting on balloons to get Al going and balling an endless parade of withered old men at the swingers’ commune, having the time of her life. She can have every damn one of the old farts all to herself; after enduring Calvin’s lusty affections for nearly five years, Louise never wants to see crepey, gray-haired old man scrotum again. 

Louise figures Bronconius has probably found some way to cheat Tina or at least under-pay her. It’s how the world works. The strong prey on the weak.

Louise stares down at the ruined doll, which glowers up at her, accusing. She remembers vividly how her family destroyed her favorite possession and Teddy bungled his attempt to fix it back when she was only nine, when her dad was still alive. It still has lopsided breasts. She can see what must be Teddy’s thumbprint melted into the plastic of one of them. Just like everything they all touched, their effort to fix Kuchi Kopi went straight to hell.

“Is it Good Kuchi or Bad Kuchi?” Tina asks, doggedly persistent till the end. “But maybe you don’t want it now.”

“There is no bad coochie,” Louise says drolly, but she knows deep down that she’s lying. “No, thanks, I don’t want it. Give it to your kids.” She shoves the box back into Tina's hands. The backward steps are coming faster now. Louise can’t be out of there soon enough, and she knows she’ll do her best never to meet up with Tina again. If she does, something bad’s going to happen to her sister. Louise refuses to be held responsible.

Louise dives into the shelter of her limo, then stops short, blinking. The blond man from before is waiting for her inside.

“Don’t you remember me, Louise?” He grins, charming, but she can see the cold-eyed shark circling beneath the warm friendly expression. “It’s Logan. Logan Bush. I just got my MA. This is my last free summer before I go to Harvard law school.”

“Logan?” Louise finds herself smiling back at him. 

She’s a wary bitch, and gold-digging doesn’t have to come from a family member for her to recognize it when she sees it. Still, it might be fun to watch him try.

Louise gives Logan a thoughtful once-over. He may be an incurable asshole, but he’s grown up very, very well. There’s a lot of muscle under his tailored Brooks Brothers suit and tie, and he’s got a nice deep tan. He’d look good in a leather harness with a ball gag stuffed in his mouth, whimpering and sporting a strap-on as thick as Louise’s thigh shoved right up his ass. 

Maybe that can be arranged. 

“Logan, you old son of a bitch. How the hell are ya?” 

“Pretty fucking good, actually.” He smiles, so handsome she just wants to slap him.

Louise slams the door and taps on the glass partition. “Drive, Nat.”

“Sure thing, boss!”

Louise doesn’t look back.


End file.
